Partnerships are necessary means for Bible translation

 

Image ceated by ChatGPT. Clasping hands in partnership. OpenAI DALL-E, 2025, AI-generated image.

The theme of this blog entry appears to be a no-brainer, and in a sense nobody in the Bible translation world would disagree with this statement, at least not in the sense as most people would read it at face value. Partnership is immensely important for Bible translation, and I am definitely not here to tell you that there are people out there who don't believe it.

In fact, the opposite is the case: partnership has been taken so seriously by Bible translation practitioners and decision makers in the past 20 years that many of them have gone overboard and have turned partnership into an end in itself, at the cost of almost everything else. And this is what I am writing about here, as I believe that partnership is not our goal, and pursuing it like a goal can get in the way of what we actually should have as a goal.

But let's begin with the basics, reassuring ourselves that indeed without strong partnerships with the right people every Bible translation effort would be doomed. This is almost forced on the whole endeavor by its very nature, with participants and players from very different backgrounds in terms of ethnicity, training, financial capacity, organizational structure, and even belief. In a successful translation project usually the following kinds of stakeholders are involved:

• local language community representatives,
• local churches,
• national churches,
• donors from overseas, both small and large,
• technical experts as advisors and consultants,
• government authorities,
• researchers and academic institutions,
• media,
• publishing houses and license holders,
• other mission agencies,
• philanthropic organizations,
• a network of organizations and various ad-hoc boards in which all these various stakeholders interact with each other.

So there can be no doubt that skillful alliance building and partnership development have an important role to play in the Bible translation movement, and that each Bible translation organization needs to invest heavily in their capacity to set up and maintain strong partnerships.

But what I have seen very often in the past 20 years is that partnership has been elevated from a crucial tool to the very end of what we want to accomplish. Telltale signs for this have been

• progress indicators that count the number of partnerships that an organization maintains,
• impact stories which make it clear that keeping a certain partnership alive is more important than accomplishing the stated purpose of the organization, for example by sacrificing quality in order to keep a partner on board,
• exhortations from higher levels that lower levels should bend over backwards to revive partnerships that have proven to be dysfunctional or that were driving the organization away from its stated purposes,
• strong expectations that an organization submits to a governance structure that is dominated by the various partners of the organization,
  
• funneling large amounts of resources into partnership structures that have not contributed much to the success of a project or program.

Admittedly, it is widely open to discussion whether a certain organizational effort to maintain a troublesome partnership may still be a strategic move from the perspective of a given bigger picture, and many things that I would criticize here could be carefully explained to me as a necessary means to advance the goal of Bible translation. But the way people nowadays speak about partnerships I get the impression that it has really become their main goal in life. Instead of belonging to the organization that produces the Bible translations of the highest quality, they'd prefer to work in the organization that everybody everywhere likes most to partner with.

What is the essence of partnership?

A partnership is defined by (at least) two actors working towards a common goal. There are probably a lot more factors that make a partnership successful, such as mutual trust, complementary strengths, availability of resources, time, etc. But for the most basic definition one only needs to have two players and a common goal. This common goal, though, is normally not the only goal of either of the players. I may partner up with you to push your car off the road when you have a breakdown. We both have the goal to get the car off the road, because you as the owner fear for its safety and don't want to cause an accident, and I as your helper want to get your car out of the way so that the road is clear for me.

So there can be no mistake: Although we are partners in the temporary project of getting your car out of the way, both of us have a number of different goals, some of them overlapping, others not. In fact, in some areas of life we might find ourselves working against each other's goals.

Bible translation organizations at least currently appear to be under the mistaken impression that any overlap of goals implies that any partner would by nature stand behind anything the organization does. Only with this kind of understanding would it make sense to hand over the governance of such an organization into the hands of the partners, trusting that their goals are so very much in sync with the organization's goals that any future decision making would be a matter of total mutual benefit. But the reality is different.

Whereas a Bible translation organization has ideally only one goal (quality Bible translations), any single one of the many partners sees Bible translation as a means to reach widely differing goals, such as growth of the church, increased standing of the language community, economic benefits, spiritual flourishing, jobs for people close to the leadership, increase of knowledge, a larger powerbase, access to larger sections of the donor community, a good press, and many more. Some of them we can enthusiastically support, others leave us indifferent, and some we would even object to. It is therefore rather naive to assume that involving our partners in our governance decision-making would get us anywhere else than into a mess of thorny goal conflicts.

Taking our partners seriously

If we realize our partners for what they are to us, we can start to approach them in a more realistic manner. No longer do we bother them with expectations that they need to see the world as we do, with the same kind of urgency and exclusiveness directed at our one defining goal. Instead, we allow them to pursue their own legitimate goals, and we strive hard that they realize that Bible translation and language development are in their best interest. If they do, they will be willing to join forces with us in ways that bring both them and us forward into a better future, while we allow each other to be very different in anything else we do.

This also enables us to evaluate partnerships, so that maintaining a given partnership does not turn into a motivation to go astray regarding our own goals. No partnership is so important that it can force us to leave parts or all of our DNA at the roadside. If a donor, partner organization or other stakeholder is only willing to partner with us if we agree to compromise on our own foundational values, then there needs to be a very open discussion inside the organization whether this is really worth doing, because it would turn it into a very different organization.

We can be better partners ourselves if we know what our DNA is as a Bible translation organization, where our values leave us open to align ourselves with other players, and where they and we have common goals that need accomplishing. We also need to know the boundaries of our openness, where compromise would lead us into abandoning our purpose as it has been set out for us. This will enable us to pursue strong partnerships that really bring Bible translation forward, while we no longer find ourselves in a partnership treadmill that pours time, energy and resources into maintaining relationships that may have turned stale and unproductive long before, if they haven't even pulled us away from what we should really do.

No, we won't get very far without strong and healthy partnerships, but partnerships are not our final goal.

Bible translation is best done by para-church organizations

 

ChatGPT. A Team of Medieval Scholars Gathered Around a Table, Working on a Bible Translation. OpenAI DALL-E, 2025, AI-generated image.

Making this statement I'm leaning out of the window as far as I can, as you will have no trouble whatsoever finding examples that prove me wrong. Luther, Zwingli, Eugene Peterson, probably many more successful Bible translators never joined a Bible translation organization, and still got the job done. So where do I want to go with this?

This post is a follow-up to my previous post "Bible translation usually does not happen through the Church, but in spite of the Church", and there my point was that the church (with or without a capital C) is rarely the driving force in Bible translation, and we should not overburden it with expectations that it may or even should become so, as it normally and naturally pursues a large number of other and frequently competing goals. In that post I also allowed for highly motivated individuals who often initiated and even completed a translation, and these should serve to explain the counterexamples to this statement here.

Then, if we leave out the Luthers and Zwinglis and Petersons of this world, plus many other similar individuals of which I have the pleasure and honor to have met two or three in the course of my work, and if we further don't expect the church to sit in the driver's seat for the final push towards translating the remaining languages, then we need to ask ourselves who else is there to do it?

What is a para-church organization?

Para-church organizations are founded to do things that the church as such is not willing or able to do, for whatever reasons. The first example is encountered in the New Testament in Acts 6, where the Apostles appear to have botched the job of caring for widows, and when the complaints became too nagging, they threw up their hands and said "why should we deal with aliments for widows when what we really want to do is to evangelize the world? We don't even know what to do here! Find someone else who is better at that, and leave us to continue to do what we are good at!" It sounds a bit nicer in the original text, but this, in a nutshell, is what happened. Since those days more and more para-church organizations have been formed, usually with the following characteristics:

• They are interdenominational (not a thing in Acts)
• They support the church by doing things the church itself is not equipped for
• They specialize in things, so that they become really good at what they are doing
• They are normally funded and governed from outside the church institution (which is the one big difference to the story in Acts 6).

Humanitarian and social work, as seen in Acts 6, are what often was sourced out by the church to para-church organizations, such as certain monastic orders and later diaconic institutions. But since the 19th century there are also a number of para-church organizations that deal with specialized roles in mission, and since the 20th century in particular with Bible translation.

All this would be nothing to write about in a blog, had I not the nagging suspicion that the idea of a para-church organization has fallen somewhat out of fashion in current missiological reflections, at least when it comes to Bible translation. What I wrote in the other blog entry about the role of the church describes contemporary thinking much better: Bible translation should no longer be entrusted to organizations that are set up and governed outside the church, but to the church as such, whatever that may mean. And I proposed some reasons there why this idea is not likely to survive over a longer stretch of time. My main reason then was that Bible translation clashes too often with other important goals of the church and therefore may not receive the support it requires in order to thrive.

Better placed for Bible translation

It is not only the lack of a goal conflict that gives para-church organizations an edge when it comes to Bible translation. Here are a few more:

• Bible translation organizations are experts in Bible translation, which, as we have seen elsewhere, is a technical task and requires expertise.
• Bible translation organizations are tightly connected with that section of the church that truly has a vision for Bible translation, which may often be just individuals.
• Bible translation organizations are very often non-denominational, which allows them to partner with all sorts of people, even when the church landscape around the project shifts.
• Bible translation organizations can organize their own recruitment and training processes and attract recruits from all kinds of Christian backgrounds.
• Bible translation organizations can develop an institutional memory that contains standards, best practices, and quality assurance processes, and they can make sure that these are adhered to by all staff.
• Bible translation organizations usually focus on Bible translation, at the expense of everything else, which makes them good advocates for Bible translation among the church, and makes them less likely to forget about the goal of Bible translation.

There are clearly some good reasons why Bible translation is frequently done by para-church organizations. If the Bible translation movement is currently shifting to a model where these para-church organizations are either sidelined or forced to submit to a comprehensive control through church bodies, then these advantages can easily fall by the wayside.

In a sense, many of the current misunderstandings and unhelpful practices of the current Bible translation movement can be traced to such a sidelining. Wealthy donors from Western countries directly approach church partners in countries with Bible translation needs to conduct Bible translation with a focus on speed, while trying to relegate the role of Bible translation organizations to technical partners that need to serve whatever goal is presented to them by the donors. This has led to a neglect of expertise, coupled often with an unwillingness to accept what best practices have been developed over many decades by such organizations. While to the western church the overly optimistic narrative is presented that the local and national churches are willing and quite capable of doing Bible translation on their own, recruitment of westerners into Bible translation organizations goes down, degrading the capacity of the whole movement to provide the tools and to maintain the processes that make quality translations possible.

Para-church organizations are of the church

In spite of their independent structure para-church organizations are still an expression of the church. As indeed we have shown that Bible translation is very often initiated and driven forward by individuals who have caught on the vision for this task, we would never deny that these individuals are representatives of the Church and the churches they are coming from. A Bible translation organization is, quite similarly, an organized body of such individuals who have accepted that more can be accomplished if such likeminded individuals cooperate and help each other out as a community of practice with many sub-specializations to the big specialization of Bible translation that brought them together. The Church therefore forms para-church organizations to do Bible translation, as this is the most efficient and most sustainable way to go about it.

Para-church organizations are the preferred way of the church to approach complex tasks such as Bible translation that require a focused vision, a trained work force with many specializations, a coherent message to the supporters and a protected governance system that allows them to maintain their vision in spite of the recurrent tidal changes in support or neglect by the churches that called them into being.

Para-church organizations are also always quite dependent on actual churches, in both spheres of activity. They need a good connection with the church in countries that provide finances for the work, or that are the recruiting grounds for new staff, and they need to relate well to the churches in the countries where the translations happen, as indeed Bible translation works best when the local churches are on board with as much involvement as possible.

But particularly in areas where the local church is weak, untrained, or even non-existent, Bible translation organizations are the only way to devise a viable strategy for unreached people groups. Here the impetus coming out of such an organization is the force that gets the ball rolling, that trains the first staff, that maintains the needed structures and that provides the necessary tools.

Para-church organizations therefore still have a great role to play in Bible translation, and it is not a good idea to act as if they could already now get out of business. We need to take care that they are not starved out of the picture by well-meaning, but uninformed efforts by western donors to bypass them and get at the local church directly.